Mobissimo Does One Box

No doubt this project was hastened by Google's new approach to travel search. From the release:

Mobissimo One-Box Search technology allows customers to find online travel deals even more quickly and easily as it eliminates the need for customers to check multiple boxes, click calendars or type text in forms to obtain the best fares and rates for airfare, hotels and car rentals. Mobissimo’s One-Box Search processes information in just the way that consumers think. The user merely types in the departure city, the destination city and the dates.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:59 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (4)

Thinking About Google and The Turning Point

Has the worm turned? That's the question a lot of folks are asking about Google these days, not the least of which is John Heilemann, whose piece has opened up a great discussion in the comments area of my post about it. As we often do, John and I beat this question around a bit this morning, and an interesting comparison came about. John, who wrote an excellent book on Microsoft called Pride Before the Fall, reminded me that while most peg Microsoft's fall from its glory days to the attenuating DOJ trial of the late 1990s, the company's true fall from grace came before that trial, when first the digerati, then the company's potential partners started losing trust in Microsoft.

Why? John pegs it to a seminal 1997 Wall Street Journal article about the company in which Nathan Myhrvold (former MSFT CTO) speaks of his company taking a "vig" on nearly every transaction across the Internet. A year or so before that article, while managing editor of Wired, I met with Nathan. He pitched me his vision of Microsoft enabling - and profiting from - all commerce on the web (I wrote the meeting up for HotWired, but can't find the damn link...). In any case, I recall Nathan taking out his wallet and slapping it on the table, and confidently predicting that anything you did with a wallet, Microsoft would own online. I was struck by the arrogance of such a claim, and the confidence with which he made it....I really believed that Microsoft was going to own ecommerce, and it both scared and fascinated me. Turns out, I was not alone.

As we discussed the finer points of the AAP lawsuit, John noted that Google is coming close to a "worm turning" moment - a moment when the world realizes that the company is *too powerful* and its ambitions are *too great.* When such a genie arrives, it is very, very hard to put back in the bottle. The one all encompassing difference, of course, is that Google has real competition - Microsoft in 1997 did not - but regardless, the cultural vibe is striking in its similarity. Remember in 1995, when Microsoft was literally at the top of its game, lauded on the covers of national magazines for saving the US economy via its launch of Windows 95? When Gates and Co. were heralded as ushering in a new era of digitized possibility?

I sure do. In seven short years, Google has gone from a geeky startup with one good idea into an agenda-shaping player responsible for navigating complex relationships with world governments, the personal privacy of millions, major trade organizations, and hundreds of thousands of businesses small and large. It's an extraordinary weight to bear, it seems to me. It's the kind of position that requires a balanced mixture of leadership, will, and diplomacy. There's very little room for the go-it-alone mentality which got the company to where it stands today. Can the company shift its culture and avoid the fate which ultimately hobbled Microsoft? That, more than anything else, will define the next chapter in the company's fascinating story.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:20 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (43)
• TrackBacks (5)

Vivisimo CEO on Personal Search

Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo begs to differ with all the hype around personalized search (including in my book), and the idea of major engines mining your clickstream to better understand your intent (and give you more personalized ads, of course). In a short paper outlining his views, (PDF download), he outlines five major problems with personalized search and concludes:

.... search personalization is likely to waste the talents of top computer
scientists. It may even give worse results...

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:25 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (13)
• TrackBacks (2)

Loads O New Features

Google is accelerating the pace of change in both its results and its home page. Many readers have emailed me recently with tips, here are a few:

First, "Personalized Home" is now standard on the home page, up on the top right. This is an attempt to push more of us toward using its portal Fusion.

Also, many have noticed the new way Google is clustering results based on similar phrases. Try searches for President's Day Weekend, for example. And lastly, as I've noted before, Google continues to push adoption of its Toolbar, now with banner ads for it at the bottom of results (thanks Peter).

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:59 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (0)

Halsey Swivels

As reported by PaidContent, Halsey Minor, founder of Cnet and Grand Central, has recapped GC and turned it into an online advertising/campaign management company, Swivel. More here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:17 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (2)

Hey Hollywood, Will Ya Work With Us Now?

Google appoints Hollywood vet Ann Mather to its board. Mather is a financial expert from Pixar, Village Roadshow, and Paramount. Perhaps she can convince Hollywood to put some of their eggs in Google's video basket....

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:07 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (0)

Heilemann on Googlephobia

For his New York column, John keys off the AAP lawsuit:

The signs are everywhere. In France, Jacques Chirac has ordered his minions to gin up a French and German search engine—on the grounds that Google is (wait for it) a tool of U.S. cultural imperialism. In Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart board members admit to keeping a wary eye on Google—whose capacity to alert shoppers to better bargains elsewhere is seen as a burgeoning threat. Even out in Silicon Valley, reproachful accusations are hurled that the once-beloved leader of the Internet resurgence has taken on a dark Microsoftian cast.

He quotes AAP Pat Schroeder:

“Alan Murray wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that called Google’s business model a new kind of feudalism: The peasants produce the content; Google makes the profits,” she informs me, then ladles on an extra helping of ominous foreboding. “Do we really want one corporation controlling all the content in the world?”

Then explains how the case turns on interpretation of fair use:

Who’s right? Impossible to say. By all accounts, the law of fair use is mind-bendingly complex: “There are parts of it that I don’t understand, and I’ve been studying it for years,” says Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford intellectual-property guru. Like virtually everyone involved in the dispute—he’s a vocal Google backer—Lessig allows that there are precedents that point in each direction. But he also acknowledges that the legal issues are in some respects peripheral, for the battle is actually being fueled by factors at once more venal and more visceral.

And then gets into the real business at hand:

If Google were to stick to its pledges about how it would employ the megadatabase of books that it’s constructing, the book business would likely benefit. But publishers don’t believe that Google can be relied on to keep its word. They fear that the company, which has made a mint off a technology, the Internet, that publishers still only vaguely comprehend, will someday abandon its putative adherence to just-the-snippets fair use and screw the publishers with their pants on.

As usual, a fun and worthwhile read.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:49 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (15)

Om Looks at the "Return of the Eyeballs"

According to Om, Boing Boing is worth $34 million. Who knew?

Full article here. From it:

Based on recent high-profile Web content deals, the value of a unique monthly website visitor currently hovers around $38 (the average purchase price per unique user of acquisitions during the past year). As a result, those who built popular websites over the last few years look prescient: They “bought” eyeballs when the market placed little value on them -- making daily blog posts or encouraging others to upload text and photos -- and can now sell their traffic at a markup.

While I don't doubt the math - there are plenty of comps and Om has 'em all in the piece - I'm not convinced. Of course, I have a stake in all of this, what with FM and my involvement with Boing Boing. But we've been around awhile, and so far not many folks have come offering thirty million plus. Why? I'm guessing because buyers are smart enough to realize that Boing Boing and sites like it are unique voices with fierce attitudes about content and the author/audience relationship. It'd be pretty hard to buy that and simply shove a big dancing flash ad in there and make your investment back - you'd lose the very thing you bought it for - the audience. It's harder, but ultimately more profitable, to run sites like this as smaller, profitable businesses for a while, at least until the marketing approaches emerge that are accepted and embraced by author, advertiser, and audience alike. That takes time and experimentation, not a rush to sale. But it sure is fun to dream....

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:34 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (10)
• TrackBacks (3)

Tivo Bringing Search to Ads

The bricks keep getting laid in my TV/Search scenario. The WSJ (paid reg) (update free link is now avail) reports that Tivo is partnering with several large agencies to bring topic-specific search to TV advertisements.

From the piece:

People who watch traditional television are forced to view commercials in random fashion, regardless of what they may be interested in buying, says Tom Rogers, TiVo's president and chief executive. "We're flipping the dynamic," he says, allowing TiVo subscribers to search for ads that match their interests. "If you are in the market for a product, and you have no idea when commercials related to that kind of product are going to appear, it doesn't help you very much," he adds.

TiVo users will be able to set up a profile of products on their television screens by clicking on categories such as automotive or travel or typing in keywords such as "BMW" or "cruises." On a regular basis, TiVo will then download relevant commercials to TiVo recorders over the Internet or, for those users who don't have broadband, send the video via traditional broadcast signals. The commercials will appear on-screen in a folder next to the list of television shows TiVo users record.

Advertisers, in turn, will be able to select the keywords and categories with which they wish to be associated for their ads. TiVo is in discussions with advertising agencies about the best way to price such advertising, but one option is to let advertisers bid on keywords as they do when buying ads on Internet search engines.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:47 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (3)

The Search In Japanese

The Search has debuted in Japanese. Editions are coming out in around ten countries, so far. I sure wish I could read Japanese so I could see how the book is selling...

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:07 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (10)

Core Principles

This is not really search related, but...in a broader sense, in fact it is. Read this link. What do you think? If you think the woman should have to show ID when some low level bozo cop boards the bus, then prepare to have your entire clickstream similarly demanded, on equally flimsy pretense. Scary. I hope she wins.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:05 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (22)

Holiday Round Up, and Watch that Ex-Googler Site

A fun "blind taste test" between Yahoo, MSN, and Google is here. Really interesting.

Google is starting to poke around the pay per call market, and the company has also begun accepting local merchant info into its Froogle application. Whether local merchants will list is an open question, for more read the wine anecdote.

Google also announced a $3 million gift to the LoC for its digital library project. The Print/Book Search issue is really not going away, by the way, and remains a seminal debate. More to come on that, interesting to note folks changing sides on the issue...

Ask and GoFish announce multimedia search deal.

Via Silicon Beat, Pandora, a music search site, takes in $12 million. This feels like a hell of a lot. Also from SB, Dipsie, which has been very quiet for a year, has launched with a different, deep web model.

Dick Costolo is thinking hard about how to make RSS better. Read this post. (And this one from Fred).

Watch this site: Xooglers, the blog of Google's former Director of Consumer Marketing Doug Edwards (he left after five years, he acknowledges that "my life is good"). The posts are fascinating. From one of them:

It's a long story, but one I now have lots of time to tell. This blog is partly about that, but mostly about what happened during the following five years and three months, while I served as Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google.

For the last eight months, I've been gathering my thoughts in preparation for writing a book. That may still be forthcoming, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that a book would not be the Google way to do this.

And another:

Your S.A.T. score was the measure of your intellectual capability; your GPA represented the numerical summary of your ability to execute on that potential. Your value to Google could be plotted using those two data points.

Sergey's desire to reduce every decision to an equation would cause me a fair amount of frustration in the years to come. While it forced a discipline on me that was likely lacking in my career up to that point, it also went against my deeply-held conviction that some things are not expressible simply by deriving the correct algorithm.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:25 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (6)
• TrackBacks (1)

BizWeek and the Obligatory Google Cover

Businessweek gives Google the cover (surprise!) with two stories, one which focuses on the company's odd approach to business development and M&A, and the other which focuses on the culture of wealth within the ranks of the employees. Despite the cliche of covering (literally) Google a bit too obsessively, each story does break ground. Worthy reads.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:33 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (0)

Google Flash Ads?

Watch this space....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:24 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (2)

Google Separates AdSense, AdWords Bidding

In other words, you can now bid just for Google.com ads, or for content-driven ads from AdSense. There was a lot of confusion in the marketplace prior to this, now we'll see the two products really evolve independently. MediaPost coverage.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:51 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (15)

Just In

A long flight from London. And lots of news. Will post a digest before Turkey....hope all of you have a great holiday, or if you are not in the US, that you bear with us as we take stock and give thanks...

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:09 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (0)

FT Award: Friedman Wins

Alas, The Search did not win the FT Business Book of the Year award. But I'm happy to be in the company of those who were shortlisted, and Thomas Friedman, who won. News first came from Pravda, oddly, but I was there, and it was a fun night nonetheless...

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:55 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (6)

Search Engine Usage Keeps Growing

This feels like dog bites man but...

SEARCH ENGINE USE HAS CONTINUED to surge in the last year, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and comScore Networks. Forty-one percent of 1,577 Internet users surveyed by Pew in September and October reported that they had visited a search engine the previous day. When Pew conducted a similar survey in June of 2004, just 30 percent of Web users said the same. In fact, the only Web activity more popular than searching was using e-mail; about 52 percent of U.S. Web users told Pew researchers they had sent or received e-mail on the day before being surveyed this fall.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:07 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (2)

The Search Is Reviewed By The NYT

With David's book as well. It's a combo deal. Ugh. I knew that was going to happen. But I'm pleased with it, regardless. From it:

"The Google Story" and "The Search" cast those accomplishments in opposite lights. While they overlap considerably - and while both books flatter Google with covers that mimic its brilliantly modest logo - they interpret Google's ethics and future prospects differently. The sky's the limit in "The Google Story," a glowing, sometimes credulous testament to "that Googley sense of magic." Mr. Battelle takes a more knowing, technical approach and is more inclined to look for trouble.

I'll take that.

OK, on to the FT awards. A fun day in London today. What a swell city....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:52 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (6)

Start The Week

I've just got back from participating in BBC radio's "Start the Week" - an analogy for which does not really exist in the US, sadly. It's a conversation between four pretty different folks, each Monday morning. Apparently a lot of people listen to the show here in the UK. Today it was me, Clive Stafford Smith, PD James, and Frederic Raphael. The program will be available here. Next up is more BBC and then CNN and some newspapers. Wow. This is all buildup to the main event tonight, which is the book awards ceremony. It's a pretty big deal, the #2 man in govt. here, Gordon Brown, will be giving out the award. I very much expect Freakonomics to win, it's the hands down runaway favorite....In any case, it's been great fun to be here, and to see a few Searchblog readers. I hope I meet many more, the ones I have met are extremely interesting folks....

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:13 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (5)

Google Adds "Advertise On This Site" Links for AdSense

A new way of bringing in endemic advertising, which is naturally site specific. This marks a new approach for Google, and an extension of its site targeting feature. I am trying to get some details on what Google believes is competitive, as this is clearly not something professional publishers with their own sales forces are going to react to well. The idea of a link "Advertise on this site" going to anyone other than the publisher is, well, controversial. But for smaller authors, it's outsourced ad sales, and they will love it. Folks like BlogAds, FM, and others will have to prove their merit even more now.

More when I have it.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:33 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (2)

Grokking Google Base? Read Burnham and Pincus

Worth the time:

I suspect that Google will soon announce a program whereby people can register their "Base compliant" RSS feeds with Google base. Google will then poll these feeds regularly just like any other RSS reader. Publishers can either create brand new Base-compliant feeds or with a bit of XSLT/XML Schema of their own they can just transpose their own content into a Base compliant feed. Indeed I wouldn't be surprised if there are several software programs available for download in a couple months that do just that. Soon, every publisher on the planet will be able to have a highly automated, highly structured feed directly into Google base.

Once the feed gets inside Google the fun is just beginning. Most commentators have been underwhelmed by Google Base because they don't see the big deal of Google Base entires showing up as part of free text search. What these commentators miss, is that Google isn't gathering all this structured data just so they can regurgitate it piece-meal via unstructured queries, they are gathering all this data so that they can build the world's largest XML database.

And Mark Pincus:

google started with an amazing premise of doing no evil. i truly believe its founders want to help the world. my guess is that like many companies google will be a victim of its own success. like msft it will go hire the smartest people in the world. unfortunately, those people are often sharks and have less lofty goals, especially when they have yet to make their billions.

google base is a very msft mba approach to the world. while it makes business sense, it lacks soul. it does as little to help the community as bringing in a walmart. in fact, google feels a like walmart today.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:15 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (1)

Yahoo Appoints Dr. Andrei Broder

A big brain goes to Yahoo. The release is here. From it:

Broder was a Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis at IBM Research. Prior to this he was vice president for research and chief scientist at the AltaVista Company, reporting directly to the CEO. He was also a senior member of the research staff at Compaq's Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. He graduated summa cum laude from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University under Don Knuth.

Broder has done a lot of work in the past decade or so on search and IR, I've read many of his papers for the book, and as I recall he has done some work with folks now at Google.

Gary has some of Broder's greatest hits listed here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:03 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (4)

Economist: Egalitarian Engines, and Thoughts on Transparency

Interesting article (thanks Cyril) in the Economist about the effect of search engines on traffic distribution.

...there is a widespread belief among computer, social and political scientists that search engines create a vicious circle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular websites. Pages returned by search engines are more likely to be discovered and consequently linked to by others.

Not so, according to a controversial new paper that has recently appeared on

arXiv, an online collection of physics and related papers.

It took some searching (arXiv has a terrible search engine) but I found the referred piece here.

What I find intersting and important are the Economist's final conclusions. From the article:

The paper, which was posted on arXiv for comment, has now come under attack. Matthew Hindman, a political scientist at Arizona State University, says that the data used in the research are pretty shoddy. Moreover, he says, the discrepancy between the model and the real world does not necessarily come from the role of the search engine.

Whether Dr Fortunato's thesis stands the test of time remains to be seen. That it is tested must be a good thing.

I can't agree more. One of the things which is most frustrating about search, to me and to many, is the lack of transparency, and the lack of knowledge about how an increasingly convoluted ranking scheme actually works. Of course, Yahoo and Google can't publish their entire ranking scheme. But some kind of guideposting should be done.

This is even more true in the AdWords/Overture world, where real money is at stake, every minute of every day. I think this will come to a head sooner rather than later. For now it's all well and good to let Google determine its own profit margins by optimizing AdWords and AdSense behind the curtains of darkness. But that can't stand forever. There is too much opportunity to use that lack of transparency to ill ends - ie to bury competitors which are surfacing now by paying more than market prices to ensure that publishers stay with Google, for example. I am not suggesting that is happening, just that we have no way of knowing if it ever were to happen.

Toward that end, Seth's Root Markets is written up by ClickZ here...

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:39 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (1)
• TrackBacks (1)

More Patriot Act: NYT Editorial

In case I've not beat this drum hard enough, more thoughts on the bad law called the USA PATRIOT Act, this time from the NYT Editorial pages. From it:

Congress passed the Patriot Act hurriedly after the Sept. 11 attacks, with little time for reasoned discussion. Many of the most aggressive provisions were written to be phased out after a few years, to ensure that a future Congress would be able to reconsider them in calmer circumstances. If that were really happening, Congress would not be preparing to authorize the continued use of "national security letters," an investigative tool that gives the F.B.I. sweeping power to riffle through ordinary Americans' private records.

Unlike search warrants, national security letters do not need to be approved by a judge. The F.B.I. can issue them on its own initiative to places that hold sensitive information about American citizens, like libraries, doctors' offices, banks and Internet service providers. The Washington Post recently reported that the F.B.I. now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year.

Update: Seems that the extensions to the Act, which were almost pushed through this past week, were shelved yesterday, though the issue will have to be dealt with next month.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:33 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (1)

Watch Jack Ma

The CEO of Alibaba, a central figure in China and the nascent search/ecommerce wars there, is one fun fellow to watch. His recent deal with Yahoo has redoubled Ma's presence in China. Read this Forbes piece for more. From it:

Ma isn't content to dominate China's auctions and e-mail. He wants the third point of the Internet triumvirate, too: search. The CEO depicted an almost disarmingly simple strategy: "We win eBay, buy Yahoo! and stop Google. That is for fun. Competition is for fun."

Geography and/or geopolitics apparently loom large in Ma's worldview. He told reporters that while Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and Yahoo! dominate Europe and the U.S., neither is in a position to rule Asia.

"I call them sharks in the ocean. We are crocodiles in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the Yangtze River, we have more chances than they have."

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:30 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (2)
• TrackBacks (1)

HOT: London Update-New Location!

Alas, the fabled Atlantic has recently closed, so we've moved the London get together to another location.

Floridita
100 Wardour St.
London (Soho)
020 7314 4000

See you all there at 6.30-7ish tonight! First round on me....

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:14 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (3)

NY Public Library Book Search Debate

Covered in the Times here. Choice quote:

Mr. Adler (AAP lawyer) said Google's contention that its search program might somehow increase sales of books was speculation at best.

"When people make inquiries using Google's search engine and they come up with references to books, they are just as likely to come to this fine institution to look up those references as they are to buy them," he said, referring to the Public Library.

To which Google's Mr. Drummond replied, "Horrors."

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:43 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (0)

It Doesn't Really Matter Where You Are

The story is the same...

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:37 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (0)

VCs vs. The Platforms

This morning (London time) I was on a panel featuring Simon Levene of Yahoo, among others. The focus was Web 2.0 and venture capital (fittingly, it was sponsored by FirstCapital). Simon, who is MD here for Yahoo in Business Development, mentioned something that struck me as both obvious yet somehow not stated very clearly. Addressing the audience of mostly VCs, he said:

"Folks like Yahoo will be competing with you for deals."

Levene mentioned to me later that Google has even set up a fund to compete with VCs for early stage company financing (I had not head this before), and that Yahoo feels it can and must compete to buy early stage companies before VCs can get in with larger financing. An interesting development. He added that entrepreneurs are weighing the risks of having to execute against the exit requirements of a second or third round of financing, vs. the bird in the hand of a deal with a big player like Yahoo, and often, as with Flickr, they are going with the platform.

UPDATE: I pinged good sources at Google, who declare definitively that Google is not running a VC fund....

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:24 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (8)
• TrackBacks (2)

Seth Goes from Theory to Practice

Seth is starting his company based on the idea of attention markets, here is his post on the subject. I'll be reading this closely this weekend.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:07 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (0)

NYT Op Ed

I penned an op ed for the Times which runs today. They've chose to run it outside of Times Select, so you can get it without paying, but registration is required. From it:

It sure feels like a bubble, doesn't it? Let's tick off the signs: a red-hot market for Internet stocks (Google, for example, has more than quadrupled since it went public in 2004); fawning articles celebrating entrepreneurs; a glut of venture capitalists elbowing one another to invest in companies with no plans on how to make money past some hand waving about "advertising" and plenty of vague claims about how their technology will "change the world."

The Internet is exciting again, and once again folks are rushing in. In some categories - like search or social networking, for example - there are scores of start-ups vying for pretty much the same market, and it's certain that, just like last time, most of them will fail.

But regardless of all this déjà vu, we are not in a bubble.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:55 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (9)
• TrackBacks (1)

Meanwhile, YHOO Is At Five Year High

To be fair, YHOO is no slouch either.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:57 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (1)

GOOG Hits $400

Berkshire Hathaway, here they come....

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:51 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (2)

London Meetup

I'm in the airport waiting for my flight to London, and since my last post on my travels, a lot of Londoners have pinged me asking to meet up while I'm there. Funny story: I was very briefly the Publisher of Wired UK, and it was my distinct regret to have to close down that office when the US company decided it was never going to make a profit. So what did I do? I invited the entire London staff to a bar off Picadilly, called the Atlantic, slapped down my corporate card, and got the whole team well and truly pissed, as they say over there.

So, in honor of my past trials and tribs, I'd like to meet any and all of you who care to meet at the Atlantic this coming Saturday. As far as I can tell it doesn't have a website, but here's some info, and a Frommer's link:

Sat Nov. 19th, 6:30 pm ....

Atlantic Bar & Grill Ltd
020 7734 4888
020 7734 5400
20 Glasshouse Street
Westminster, United Kingdom

Hope to see you all there, Michelle (my wife) and I will be there with bells on....

UPDATE: This has MOVED to Floridita, more detail here.....

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:43 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (7)

Fred Says: Google Is Lame

Why? Because it can't respond in web time. Link.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:27 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (0)

Too Little Inventory at Portals

Now there's a problem. (paid content)

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:24 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (1)

All Your Base Are Google, The Launch

It's happening: Google Base is launching. (Check the Google Blog for a post, I am sure there will be one.) I plan to talk to Google about this, though what with leaving for London and all, I may not be able to. Suffice to say, this is a major undertaking by Google, and it remains to be seen if the public will take to it. In fact, this is a test of sorts - how large will this get? Will folks trust Google with their data? Will folks see the value in it? Will Google Base become the first application that forces Google to....gasp...market its offerings? As in "List your data on Google Base, the "it" place to represent reality"?

Google is saying this is simply a new way to augment their search results. Google's right. And that alone makes it one Very Big Deal. From the PR note emailed to me just now:

Today, we launched Google Base a free online service where users can submit all types of online and offline content that Google will host and make searchable online. ....Google Base is an extension of Google’s existing content collection efforts such as our traditional web crawl system, as well as Google Sitemaps, Google Print and Google Video – all which enable content owners to easily make their information searchable via Google. The goal of Google Base is to improve the overall quality and breadth of Google Search results by collecting even more information about a wider diversity of content. ....Similar to a database, Google Base enables content owners to describe and assign attributes to it the information they upload and uses this meta-data to better target search results to what users are looking for. For example, if a chef chooses to upload their very best recipe for tamales he/she can further describe that recipe with a photo or by assigning attributes such as “medium-spicy” or “spicy.” When a user searches for the word [tamale recipes] from the Google Base homepage they will be presented with a list of recipe results accompanied by a list attributes at the top of page which enable them to further refine their search to “medium-spicy” or “hot” tamale recipes.

Rarararararghghghghghghg...this kind of disingenuous exemplar text makes me grind my teeth. This has as much to do with tamales as, well, forget what I have to say about it. Go back to the basics, and once again, read Paul Ford.

Again, from the email:

Google Base also creates a new opportunity for content producers to submit any kind of information even if it’s not a web page or online.

Behold, the physical world rendered as information. One of the main arguments in my book is that if it's not in the index, it's not considered valuable in a search-driven world. This, of course, is a new way to Get Into The Index. We've only just begun....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:00 PM
• Permalink
• Comments (24)
• TrackBacks (2)

Paid Search Numbers

So I've been watching revenue estimates for the paid search marketplace lately, and I'm confused. The target for 2006 was $6 billion, set a few years ago by Piper. We're clearly past that - and a year early. But the numbers are all over the place lately. Here's a quote from the Kelsey Group, for example:

"Paid search advertising may well reach $7 billion in 2005,” said Neal Polachek, senior vice president, research and consulting, The Kelsey Group.

OK, so...Google is going to do about $6 billion in revenues this year. Toss out AOL and Ask, as they are in that gross number. But Yahoo is not. They do at least a billion and a half more in search revenues. Then there are the second tier players, who have to throw in a few more hundred million bucks here and there. And what about the Yellow Pages folks?

Anyway, with just Google and Yahoo's results to date, we're way past $7 billion. Right? Or maybe Kelsey is not counting AdSense as paid search? Whose numbers do you believe?

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:09 AM
• Permalink
• Comments (6)